by M. M. Kaye
I don’t remember the name of Taxila’s ruler, but I do remember the name of his enemy, because it reminded me of ‘porous plasters’ — the old-fashioned kind that doctors used to prescribe when I had a bad cough: strong-smelling grey sludge, heated and then spread on a square of lint and clapped on my shrinking chest. His name was Porus, but though Tacklow pronounced that as Poh-rus, I could read by then, so I knew how porous plasters should be pronounced. And also that a ‘po’ was an unmentionable object.
Tacklow and Alum Din could both tell a story so well that you felt you could actually see what they were describing; which is why I can still visualize the opening scene of the Battle of Hydaspes.
Porus’s long front line consisted of at least 200 war-elephants, and at first it seemed as though he was going to win a bloodless victory. For when Alexander’s cavalry attempted to cross the ford, their horses refused to face the elephants lined up on the other side, and the initial assault ended in a wild confusion of furious shouting men, trumpeting elephants, flashing hooves and rearing, splashing, screaming horses.
But Alexander was more than a leader of men, he was a brilliant tactician. Undeterred by that first rebuff, he pulled back his army and set about finding another place where he could cross the Jhelum — or the Hydaspes if you insist. He found one after several weeks, some sixteen miles upstream of the ford, and, with the aid of a small island in a sharp bend of the river, got his army across, attacked Porus’s flank and won a resounding victory after a fiercely fought battle with appalling loss of life — only a fraction of them Greek — and the capture or destruction of all those unfortunate elephants. Porus, who had reportedly fought like a tiger and sustained any number of wounds, was taken prisoner, but treated with such generosity that he became an ally of his ex-enemy; when, later, Alexander’s army, grown homesick and battle-weary, refused to move any further into the unknown land and he was forced to turn back, he appointed Porus to be his Viceroy over that part of his conquests which lay between the Jhelum and the northern bank of the Hyphasis — the river that we now know as the Beas.
Nowadays the excavations at Taxila cover so much ground that it is hard to believe that there can be anything left to look for, but in the closing years of the 1920s there was comparatively little to see, for the digging had presumably stopped during the war years and, as far as I can remember, the museum consisted of only one or at the most two small and rather poky rooms in the modest house where the Marshal family lived, instead of the spacious building that has replaced it. But buried treasure has always held a potent spell, and I remember being fascinated by the necklaces and brooches fashioned from beads or beaten gold and copper wire, the coins, seals and fragments of pottery, displayed in glass cases, and the maze of narrow streets and roofless rooms that Sir John guided us through, explaining as he went so that the city seemed to come alive again as he talked.
It was a memorable two days. We left with regret after an early breakfast and drove on in the sparkling, dew-washed morning up the straight white corridor of the Grand Trunk Road; the newly risen sun at our backs and the shadows of the sal trees and the scarlet-blossomed silk-cotton trees stretching long and blue ahead of us. There can have been few more pleasant things to do in that post-war world, when the horror and destruction of the ‘Great’ War was less than ten years behind us, and the twentieth century was still young, than to drive along the more northerly stretch of the Grand Trunk on a spring morning. Even now, when it carries a river of petrol-driven traffic that fouls the air with fumes, it can be beautiful, for many years later — forty years after the land through which we were travelling had become Pakistan — a sad errand took me down that same road on another spring morning. But despite that sadness, and the racket and dust of the streams of traffic, the Grand Trunk was still beautiful, the flowering shrubs still starred with blossom and the dâk trees ablaze with scarlet.
The Moguls, too, had liked to spend the worst of the hot weathers by the lakes of Kashmir, on the shores of which they had built some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, and the route they preferred to take was the one that we were taking that year, by a side road which branches off the Grand Trunk at the little wayside town of Hasan Abdul and leads towards Abbottabad and the high hills. We stopped in Hasan Abdul to fill up with petrol — which, in those pre-petrol-pump days, was sloshed straight from a can into the car’s petrol tank with the aid of a tin funnel — and while Mother and Abdul kept an eye on these proceedings, Bets, Tacklow and I went off to see the tomb of Lalla Rookh — the lovely lady whose name will always be linked with the Vale of Kashmir.
In those days her modest tomb stood on a bare hillside, well outside the town and in a little walled garden in which there were a few jasmine and rose bushes — the small, sweetly scented roses that Omar Khayyam wrote of — several fruit trees and a single dark cypress. I have an original watercolour sketch of that little walled garden, painted by a Major Edward Molyneux over ninety years ago and reproduced in a book on Kashmir by Francis Younghusband.* That little sketch shows that except for the height of the trees in the garden, Lalla Rookh’s tomb cannot have altered very much since it was first built; for on that spring morning in 1928 it looked exactly as it had to Molyneux when he painted it in the closing years of the previous century.
But I would not advise any present-day tourist to go in search of it, because Hasan Abdul is no longer that small wayside town; even less is it like the quiet little village where Ash-Ashok, the hero of one of my India novels, riding across country from ‘Pindi to Attock, stopped at twilight to let his horse rest and graze while he ate his evening meal on a grassy hillside overlooking Lalla Rookh’s tomb.
The little town is now a thriving, bustling place, full of shops, garages and petrol pumps, that has spread out across the once open country at its back. The tomb itself is still there. But the garden wall with its beautifully proportioned gate and charming little domed corner towers has gone and the garden is now a mere matter of gravel paths and a few neat flowerbeds thinly sown with marigolds and zinnias, strongly reminiscent of a public garden in one of the less attractive seaside towns in England. Both the charm and the romance have left it.
But both were present on that spring morning near the end of the twenties, and the road to Abbottabad was one of the prettiest in the Punjab. Even that sedate publication Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon said that although the road to Kashmir via Murree was the most important, the one via Abbottabad ‘though 35 miles longer, is more picturesque and has easier gradients’. I don’t remember the gradients being much better, but it was certainly more picturesque, and compared with the Grand Trunk there was very little traffic on it; less and less as the fruit blossom, mango groves, cane-brakes, banana palms and orchards of limes and oranges gave place to fir and pine. With every mile the air became noticeably cooler as we climbed up and up into the forest-clad foothills that smelt as Simla used to — of pine-needles, maidenhair fern and woodsmoke. For the thrifty plains do not burn wood; their fuel is dung-cakes made from the droppings of cattle, carefully collected and patted into large, flat pancakes that are pressed on to the walls of the houses to be dried by the sun. The scent of dung fires is as potent a reminder of the plains as woodsmoke is of the hills.
We must have stopped somewhere for lunch, probably in Abbottabad. But I don’t remember anything about that small hill-station, which was then the headquarters of a brigade of Gurkhas and Mountain Artillery, and a popular summer resort for the wives and families of men stationed in that part of the Punjab. I was to know it well later on when Bill’s battery was stationed there, but my mind is a blank as far as my first sight of it is concerned. Nothing about it left any impression at all, yet I can remember a large part of our journey there from Hasan Abdul, and almost every yard of the steep, zig-zag road through the bazaar at Mansehra, a hill village some twenty-five miles further on which we reached at about sunset, and in whose Dâk-bungalow we spent the night.
Down on the plains the late March weather had been warm verging on hot, and we had been wearing cotton dresses, but Mansehra (according to Mother’s red guidebook) was just over 3,500 feet above sea-level and its Dâk-bungalow stood on the crest of a bare ridge strewn with enormous lichen-covered boulders, its back to the village and facing a long, unpopulated valley that stretched away below it, ringed by mountains whose peaks were still white with snow and, as the sun dipped behind the horizon, it was suddenly very cold.
Dusk does not linger in eastern countries as it does in the west, and twilight was barely a breath between daylight and the dark: one minute the snows glowed pink and gold and apricot, and almost the next minute they were coldly blue against a darkening sky in which the first stars twinkled like hoar-frost. The night wind arose and began to blow through the long verandah of the isolated bungalow, bringing with it a lovely fragrance — which surprised me because there were few trees on the ridge and those were still leafless, and what little grass there was on the bare hillside was brown and parched. It was plain that spring had still not reached Mansehra, yet the night wind smelled of flowers. It was a small puzzle, and Bets and I abandoned it and went inside to hunt out a few winter woollies from the suitcases that Abdul Karim had directed the Dâk-bungalow servants to unload and stack in our bedroom.
In those days there was no electricity in such places, but there were hurricane ‘butties’ a-plenty, and by their light we bathed in tin tubs filled with piping-hot water, heated in kerosene tins over pine-log fires which made the water smell deliciously of woodsmoke. Later we ate the usual four-course Dâk-bungalow dinner of soup (Brown Windsor or Mulligatawny), murgi (chicken, curried or roast), followed by something that the khansama called ‘broon custel’ and finishing up with a savoury that was usually sardines on toast, or cheese straws. This menu seldom varied, though ‘mutton cutlet’ (invariably goat) was sometimes substituted for chicken — and for my part, much preferred, as I never really grew resigned to seeing, and worse still, hearing, some unfortunate hen being chased shrieking around the back premises to be caught and killed, vocal to the last; to appear on the menu a scant hour and a half later, either over-cooked or curried. At least the portions of stewed or roast goat were purchased in the bazaar and not noisily slain on the premises.
I still have, in one of my many photograph albums, kept as a cherished memento of countless Dâk-bungalow style meals, the menu of the very last meal I was to eat on Indian soil as the curtain fell on the Raj and we sailed away from a city that was about to become the major port of a brand-new country, Pakistan. The menu is hand-written by the khansama and, either in honour of the occasion or as an affectionate gesture towards the departing Sahib-log, it was a strictly British meal, starting with onion soup and including such colonial favourites as ‘Cottage Pie and Cabbag’, followed, for the pudding course, by: ‘Blanc Monge and Mallon’. The only thing absent on this one is that popular vegetable usually rendered in English by a majority of khansamas as ‘russel-pups’, which the initiated will instantly recognize as brussels sprouts. Dear Dâk-bungalows — how I miss you!
After breakfast next morning, while Abdul Karim and his platoon of helpers were loading up the cars, Bets and I went for a walk down the hillside below the house. The sunshine of yesterday had vanished, and it was one of those cold, colourless days when the sky looks like polished pewter and even though there are no shadows, everything, near or far, appears in sharp focus. The mountains that ringed the valley seemed much further away than they had seemed in the sunset, and as decoratively artificial as a stage-setting, as though they had been cut from cardboard in several shades of grey and pasted, layer by layer, on the flat pewter sky, then carefully embellished in poster-paint with chalk-white snow-peaks.
I can still see that view as if it was a picture, one like Hobbema’s Avenue or Constable’s Haywain that you can instantly visualize if someone speaks of it. I cannot explain why it fascinates me so — except that it still means spring to me. True, there were no colours in it; only endless shades of grey, the odd touch of black, that startling white and, under the huge wind- and water-worn boulders that littered the hillside, small splashes of green. For I had been wrong in thinking that spring had not yet reached Mansehra, and I knew now why the night wind had smelled so sweet. Sheltering under every boulder, protected from the wind and the wintry gales, were patches of white violets, hundreds and hundreds of them, smelling of paradise.
I imagine that everyone will know how it is when something suddenly lifts your heart, and for no explained reason makes life seem lovely and the world a nicer place — the sight of something, or someone; a waft of scent or a bar of music; a line from a poem; a ‘rainbow and a cuckoo’s song’. It must happen to everyone at some time or another, and the white violets on the black hillside at Mansehra did it for me. I picked a bunch of them for Mother, and I pressed one or two in my sketchbook, where they turned brown and eventually disintegrated. But they, and Mansehra, are fixed in my memory for good.
The thing I chiefly remember about our drive next day was that the weather turned nasty on us, and so did the road, which twisted and turned with such wild abandon that I became horridly carsick (shades of my youth and my first car ride down the hill road from Simla to Kalka!) and we had to stop while I decanted my breakfast over the edge of the road. I was filled up with brandy and changed places with Tacklow, who always sat in the front seat by Mother. I’m not sure which of these two prescriptions did the trick; perhaps it was a combination of the two. But I can recommend it to the carsick. By the time we arrived at Domel, where the two main routes to Kashmir, the one from Rawalpindi and the other from Abbottabad, meet, and the Kishenganga river merges with the Jhelum, I was feeling a bit hollow but otherwise OK.
There is a toll to pay before one crosses the bridge at Domel, and a customs post where all travellers must have their baggage checked — and on occasions searched. There is also, we belatedly discovered, a toll on animals and birds, and when a whispered warning of this was hurriedly conveyed to me by Abdul Karim, I took the precaution of transferring Pozlo from his travelling cage to the small, flannel-lined Lipton’s Tea tin which he treated as a nest when the weather was chilly, and successfully smuggled him past the customs — thus saving a toll of annas four — or it may have been eight. Not a gigantic sum, but as we had failed to look up the rules relating to birds, we did not care to risk having him confiscated.
The khansama at Mansehra had provided us with a picnic lunch we had meant to eat by the roadside, but as the day had turned wet and cold we ate it instead on the verandah of the Dâk-bungalow at Garie, before driving on to arrive late in the wet darkness of a rainy evening at the little Dâk-bungalow that stands on a steep hillside above the Kashmir road at Uri. Here, after dining by the light of a couple of flickering oil-lamps, we fell asleep lulled by the muted roar of the Jhelum river racing high and furious through the narrow gorge below, and awoke in the thin sunshine of a March morning to find that here, as under the gaunt boulders that littered the bleak ridge at Mansehra, spring had arrived before us; for the window of our bedroom looked out across a verandah on to a blaze of pink blossom, an almond tree in full bloom in the narrow strip of garden above the Domel -Srinagar road.
That almond tree was as lovely and as unforgettable a sight as the white violets, and it has always remained in my memory as a fitting introduction to the valley of Kashmir. Perhaps because, like the violets, it was so unexpected — coming as it did after the previous day’s driving through non-stop drizzle and clinging mists that blotted out everything beyond a range of fifty yards, the ghastly carsickness and that unappetizing picnic eaten on the verandah of the least attractive of Kashmir’s Dâk-bungalows. But whatever the reason, it still stands out in my memory, together with the violets at Mansehra and the frangipani tree seen by moonlight on the Kalka–Simla road,* as something very special — like one of the Seven Wonders of the World. That almond tree is not there any more; nor, I gather, is the Dâk-bungalow, an
d perhaps Uri, too, has been blown out of existence. In the fighting that followed Independence and the partition of India into two separate countries, Pakistani and Indian troops fought each other among the Kashmir mountains, and, according to various newspaper accounts at the time, Uri was shelled and the fighting around it was particularly fierce.
It is sad to think of that charming little village reduced to rubble and the almond tree smashed by shell-fire; but as far as I am concerned it is still there, exactly as it was when I first saw it, its blossoms looking like a milky way of rose-pink stars in the early morning sunlight. Only when I am dead will it cease to be real.
The sunlight of the early morning did not last. We left it behind us when we drove away from Uri, singing ‘My Blue Heaven’ and ‘I’ve Fallen in Love with a Voice’, and the steep sides of the gorge closed in on us; the enormous rock-faces soaring upwards on either hand, their tops lost in the mists, bare as the back of one’s hand or spiked here and there with tall deodars, pine and fir trees and dripping with maidenhair fern and a thousand little waterfalls. Here and there the water washed across the winding road to pour out of gaps in the low stone walls that edged it, and plummet down the steep hillsides to join the raging mill-race of the Jhelum as it rampaged down the narrow gorge several hundred feet below, whirling down thousands of baulks of timber, thrown into it by logging camps many miles up-stream, to stock timber-yards in the Punjab. Mother kept on pointing out bits of scenery that she assured me were really spectacular if only the mist would lift and the drizzle stop; but it didn’t, so I had to take her word for it. Even the gorge at Rampur, which I was sure of recognizing from Molyneux’s painting in Younghusband’s Kashmir, was shrouded in mist, and there was nothing visible of the famous limestone cliffs, and only the occasional glimpse of the deodar forests. About the only thing we could see clearly was the power station, where the Jhelum has been harnessed to generate electrical power for houses, houseboats and hotels throughout the valley, as well as for the irrigation of millions of acres in the plains of the Punjab. Useful, admittedly. Very useful. But hardly lovely to look at.
